A review of design fixation: research directions and key factors

Alipour, Leyla; Faizi, Mohsen; Moradi, Asghar Mohammad; Akrami, Gholamreza

doi:10.1080/21650349.2017.1320232

Cited by 26 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…Sio et al also only included studies involving 'non-negative examples' that did not breach requirements for target design problems, which may further limit their conclusions. Notwithstanding these issues, however, Sio et al's findings resonate with observations arising in Alipour, Faizi, Moradi, and Akrami's (2017) integrative review of 50 studies of fixation and inspiration effects in design, which likewise indicated that uncommon examples that are an appropriate distance from the target design problem can to mitigate fixation effects.…”

Section: Solution Fixation and Solution Inspirationmentioning

confidence: 70%

Advancing an understanding of design cognition and design metacognition: Progress and prospects

Ball

Christensen

2019

Design Studies

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In this article we review progress that has been made in advancing a theoretical understanding of design cognition and design metacognition. We identify a high level of consistency in empirical findings, including good evidence for core design strategies such as conjecture-based problem formulation, problem-solution co-evolution, analogical reasoning, mental simulation and fixated solution generation. A further consistent theme to emerge in our review concerns the central role played by metacognitive monitoring and control processes in ensuring the effective deployment of design strategies in response to designers' fluctuating feelings of uncertainty. We argue that a metacognitive perspective on design cognition is critical for developing a comprehensive understanding of strategic processing in design, additionally engendering many new avenues for important future research.

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Section: Solution Fixation and Solution Inspirationmentioning

confidence: 70%

Advancing an understanding of design cognition and design metacognition: Progress and prospects

Ball

Christensen

2019

Design Studies

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“…This article also conceptualised the design fixation on higher scales such as organisations and institutions, and thereby provided a greater understanding in particular to design fixations in teams and organisations as well as the scalability of the concept. This is expected to enhance the body of knowledge on design fixation [15,47], which is to date largely based on experimental research of individual designers and informs little on real-world design [109]. On the organisational level, this article showed that the literature found that conceptual fixation occurred in large organisations [58] and that the knowledge fixation was found as an important gap [40] (see Section 3.4).…”

Section: Conceptualisation Of Design Fixation On Higher Levelsmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…Design fixations are a bias to prior solutions or known concepts, whereas creativity is about producing novelty and usefulness [48]. In this paper, while acknowledging the existence of tested methods to overcome design fixation on the micro-level [47], we assume that the ability of design thinking to elicit creativity is a promising way to avoid and overcome design fixation. We premise that designers who apply design thinking are less susceptible to design fixations.…”

Section: Design Thinking To Overcome Design Fixationmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Whereas design fixations on the individual level are established, two new levels of design fixation are proposed here, organisational and institutional design fixations. Even though most empirical studies on design fixation have been conducted on industrial or mechanical design [47], it seems reasonable to extrapolate the concept and apply it to higher levels of analysis.…”

Section: Conceptual Framework For Design Fixation In the Sustainability Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Conceptualising Design Fixation and Design Limitation and Quantifying Their Impacts on Resource Use and Carbon Emissions

Wasserbaur

Sakao

2020

Sustainability

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Design for sustainability needs to apply a societal perspective. The purpose of this paper is to combine the concept of design fixation with higher levels of analysis. Design fixation is used to describe a blind adherence to known concepts during the design process. It is used mostly at the micro level of design with the focus on the activities of an individual designer or a group of designers. In this paper, design fixation gets conceptually lifted to the levels of the organisation and the institution. We ask how the understanding of design fixation helps to achieve higher resource efficiency. Examples of organisational and institutional design fixations are presented. A System Dynamics model is used to simulate the impacts of design fixation on resource use of a sociotechnical laundry systems. Applying this lens suggests that in order to solve societal design fixations, systemic parameters like infrastructure, business models, or policies need to be considered design parameters. The simulation results show that high-level design fixations can have significant impact on resource use.

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“…To better understand design fixation, many research studies have been conducted, typically adopting the general experimental paradigm described by Jansson and Smith. These studies are sufficiently numerous that dedicated review papers have been published (Alipour, Faizi, Moradi, & Akrami, 2017;Sio, Kotovsky, & Cagan, 2015;Vasconcelos & Crilly, 2016) in addition to the detailed reviews that are used to introduce empirical or theoretical work (for recent examples see Agogué, Poirel, Pineau, Houdé, & Cassotti, 2014;Cheng, Mugge, & Schoormans, 2014;Moreno, Blessing, Yang, Hernández, & Wood, 2016;Viswanathan, Atilola, Esposito, & Linsey, 2014;Youmans & Arciszewski, 2014). These reviews all focus on experimental research into design fixation, and make little mention of the real-world design practices within which fixation occurs or examples of such occurrences.…”

Section: The Concept Of Fixationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Creativity and fixation in the real world: A literature review of case study research

Crilly

2019

Design Studies

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There are several prior case studies of design creativity which relate to design fixation. There is also a broader literature of qualitative research surrounding these cases, both within and beyond the design literature. However, these various texts are widely distributed, not well connected and seemingly not well known. This paper reviews the relevant literature, collecting many of these studies together for the first time. This allows the texts to be compared, their common themes to be identified and future work to be planned.More of such studies are necessary to increase the breadth and depth of accounts of creative design. This would permit connections and contrasts to be made and promote methodological diversity within research on inspiration and fixation.

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A review of design fixation: research directions and key factors

Cited by 26 publications

References 59 publications

Advancing an understanding of design cognition and design metacognition: Progress and prospects

Advancing an understanding of design cognition and design metacognition: Progress and prospects

Conceptualising Design Fixation and Design Limitation and Quantifying Their Impacts on Resource Use and Carbon Emissions

Creativity and fixation in the real world: A literature review of case study research

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